Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2017 (27th Feb-5th March)
In honor of Eating Disorder Awareness Week I have written a post of things I wish people knew about Eating Disorder’s/Recovery and also What I wish I had known about Eating Disorder Recovery! I will also be doing some fundraising for Beat — The UK’s Eating Disorder Charity with a JustGiving Page! I will also be doing a Like and Comment Post on Facebook — the winner will get a Cheesecake/Dessert or Traybakes of their choice and a small Easter Basket!
What I wish People Knew about Eating Disorders/Eating Disorder Recovery.
1. It is not a Choice.
One of the most upsetting things someone could have said to me when I was at my most unwell was that I was choosing to be that way. It can be so hard to express to somebody that you are not able to control your own thoughts, and that your mind is constantly causing you to deny yourself a basic human right; the right to eat. Although it is possible to make the choice to eat, it is not possible at that time to choose to avoid the feelings of intense guilt and self-hatred that follows. These are just some of the feelings that come with having an eating disorder, and it can take a very long time and a lot of hard work to lessen those feelings and to make eating the more worthwhile choice.
No one wakes up one day and says, “You know what would be really fun? Putting myself through hell.” No one does that.
Eating disorders choose you. And as such, giving *advice* like “Just eat!” really isn’t helpful.
You can’t tell a depressive to just “cheer up.” You can’t tell someone with an anxiety disorder to just “relax.”
You can’t tell someone with an eating disorder to just choose not to have an eating disorder.
2. It is okay to talk to me about my eating disorder.
By this, I don’t mean by asking how much I weigh or how much I’ve eaten. These questions will likely cause me to feel defensive and embarrassed. But it is okay to ask me how I am, if there is anything I’m finding particularly challenging, and if there is anything that you could do to help. If I don’t feel comfortable answering I will say, but chances are it will make me feel like you care and want to support me. People with eating disorders can often feel very ashamed, and it is by talking and encouraging openness and honesty that we will break down the stigma surrounding them and promote recovery. However, please don’t comment on my appearance. You might see me making progress, and that’s great. Whilst I might speak positively about recovery, I may still be battling my distorted body image constantly. If you have noticed I seem happier, please say so. If you think I have been more relaxed, please say so. But please don’t tell me I ‘look well’, or that I am looking ‘much healthier’. My rational brain understands that you mean well and are trying to be complimentary and supportive. My eating disordered brain will translate those comments into ‘you look fat’ or ‘you have gained weight’. This can cause both parties to feel guilty and upset. Eating disorders are about so much more than appearance, and it is by talking about the thoughts and feelings that go alongside them that we will really begin to understand them.
3. Please try and be patient.
Chances are, I will lie to you. I will be deceptive. I will tell you things are fine when they aren’t. I will start doing well, and then I won’t again. But none of these things mean I’m not trying and that I don’t care about you. Often I am hiding things because I don’t want to hurt you, and because I feel guilty for putting you through this. Please don’t give up on those who are suffering. Continue to encourage them to talk to you, and remind them that you are there no matter what stage of recovery they are at.
4. Eating Disorders are a mental illness.
There is nothing vain about having an eating disorder. Wanting to lose or control your weight is a side effect of deep rooted and complicated emotional difficulties. It is not about wanting to look like a celebrity or to gain attention. Sufferers often feel a deep sense of shame and do not want to draw attention to their illness, which can be influenced by the fear that this stigma of vanity and narcissism will reflect badly on them. I have been so scared at times that people would think I was behaving in these ways to ‘gain attention’, when I had actually spent so long trying to cover them up and hide them from others. Eating disorders are incredibly dangerous, and more physically painful than is imaginable. Even after recovery, the physical side effects can last for months, years, and even be permanent. It is time that we broke through the discrimination that eating disorder sufferers experience and understand what they are really about.
Eating disorders are mental illnesses with physical side effects.
That means that they can’t be simplified into their physical side effects. Anorexia isn’t defined by restricting calories. Bulimia isn’t defined by purging intake. Binge eating disorder isn’t defined by eating large quantities of food.
At the end of the day, eating disorders aren’t really about food. They’re so much more complicated than that. And when you try to simplify them, you really do a disservice.
5. Eating disorders do not discriminate.
There’s this really destructive myth that eating disorders only happen to — well — as is often believed, young, well-to-do white women.
But it’s a lie!
It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a person of colour. It doesn’t matter if you’re a person without a whole lot of money, or someone who doesn’t live in the Western World.
Your religion, your age, your ability, your education, your employment status, your family dynamics, and your favourite colour — none of it matters.
An eating disorder can strike anyone.
6. Recovery is possible, and it is worth it.
I have been suffering with an eating disorder in some form or another for 4 years now. I have been treated as both an inpatient and in the community. I am currently the furthest into recovery that I have ever been. It is hard to fully appreciate how all consuming, debilitating and painful eating disorders can be, and it can seem like it is impossible to get better. But it is possible, and it is worth it. There were countless times when I felt like giving up, but my life is so much fuller and richer now than it has ever been. I am immeasurably happier, and it is by far the hardest but most worthwhile thing I have ever done and am continuing to do. I would encourage everybody to talk about eating disorders, whether you know someone who is suffering, have done so yourself, or want to spread awareness to others. I wouldn’t be where I am today without learning to talk. It is a long, hard process, it has to be deliberate and it is a battle every single day but it is worth it. Just like eating disorders differ person to person, recovery processes do, too. There is no perfect recovery, and a relapse isn’t a failure. Every day that you wake up and say “I am fighting against you today, eating disorder!” you’re already winning.
Eating Disorders Matter and Raising consciousness about them is important. It has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness!
What I wish I had known about Eating Disorder Recovery
In the movie version of my life, eating disorder recovery would probably go about like this:
- Movie-me hits “rock bottom”, accepts she has a problem
- Movie-me enters a recovery program, thinks she is not like the others but through trials, tribulations, a few quirky montages, overcomes adversity and gains full recovery.
- Movie-me reunites with lost love; screen fades to credits while we walk hand in hand eating ice cream, never to count a calorie again.
However, in the real world, recovery has not been nearly so easy, nor has it involved a single joyous 80s song montage. In fact, in a lot of ways it has sucked and been really hard. This post is dedicated to people who may be entering recovery — I want to tell you some of the hard stuff, not to be discouraging, but so that you can know you are not alone when it comes up, and so that you can keep on going.
1. Recovery is actually not a straight road.
In the recovery world, there are literally a bazillion different quotes used to describe the fact that recovery is not a straight road. There are bumps in the roads. Keep going! Hang in there!
Learning that recovery is not always a straightforward journey via uplifting quotes is one thing. Believe me! I used to trawl through them for motivation when I was considering recovery. Experiencing it first hand, however, is a whole different beast. Recovery is nasty at times, a seemingly all-uphill road, with constant rain and hail. At many points it just seems so much easier to go back to the disorder, which seems so much easier and more familiar than the rocky road of recovery.
Unfortunately for cynics like me, this is where faith comes in. Recovery requires bravery and trust that even if it’s all uphill and rainy for now, the sun will come out eventually.
2. It is boring.
This was perhaps the biggest “surprise” lesson for me: RECOVERY IS BORING. Think about it this way: pre-recovery, about 70% of my time/energy was spent obsessing about food, eating or not eating food, plotting out what I would or would not eat, trying to get out of plans that involved socializing with food. It takes up a lot of time to have an eating disorder, and when you don’t have it, you get bored.
The hard part is that when you are bored, you are tempted to have something to do, and the eating disorder is right there waiting. To resist it, you have to find new activities. Take a knitting class. Start yoga. Do some colouring. Find a new hobby. For me this was baking and colouring…yes, really! It allowed me to do things I enjoy and switch off from my eating disorder, and I had room for it because I no longer had the eating disorder.
3. Life doesn’t get easier, it gets harder.
In the movie version of your eating disorder recovery, you’d have a big epiphany moment that you need to get better, indulge in a little montage involving eating healthy foods and putting yourself out there, and then you’d magically be living a lovely life.
Thing is, in real life, you’ve probably messed up a lot of personal relationships and aspects of your life in the name of your eating disorder. I know I did. Recovery is the time when you need to dig in and really repair all of the damage that you have done, not just to your body but to your life. And it gets harder before it gets easier.
4. You will lose some friends.
You might lose friends along the way when you decide to enter recovery. I sure did. There were a few reasons why:
-personally, I was really whiny and annoying for a long time. People lost patience. They didn’t disappear, exactly, but certain friendships went into a sort of hibernation while I got myself right enough to function again.
-you can emerge from your eating disorder as a new person. I was. I had opinions where once I was compliant, I told the truth rather than lying and being secretive. Not everyone will like the new you. It’s OK.
5. You will regress to the point where your eating disorder started.
I developed an eating disorder around the age of 19/20. In some ways, my emotional growth was stunted at that point, so when I entered recovery and no longer had my eating disorder as a crutch, I basically had to have a crash-course in emotional intelligence that I should have been slowly learning through my 20’s. So, I became someone in my mid/late 20’s who dealt with emotions like a teen. I cried a lot, I was immature, I was super sensitive, there was a lot of “why are you being so mean to me”. Yeah, it was awesome. Not.
6. Your body will do strange things
I knew that when I stopped eating a crazy-restrictive diet that I would gain weight. But I did not know that my body would go through a full revolt.
When you begin gaining weight after such an extended time restricting, a strange thing happens: you gain a ton of water weight. I did. For 2–3 months, my skin stretched and became swollen, making me feel like I had gained 30 pounds instead of just 5 or so. I had swollen ankles and abdomen. My skin felt too big. I felt uncoordinated. I began to get the night sweats. It was not my most dignified time.
It was very hard to persist during this phase, but I basically dealt with it by only wearing elastic-waisted clothing and throwing out everything fitted, and hiding from the world. Luckily, it leveled out after a while.
7. Everything is magnified.
For me, my eating disorder acted like a big ball of cotton candy, insulating me from everything life had to offer. I didn’t experience high highs, but nor did I experience the lowest of lows. I didn’t cry a whole lot. I didn’t really feel much of anything.
Once I stopped having my eating disorder, everything, and I mean everything, was magnified, as if in technicolor. Every feeling, every emotion, every insecurity. Without the eating disorder to act as that buffer between me and the world, I had to feel everything up close and personal. Sometimes, feeling things so much can hurt. Sometimes, my heart literally aches from feeling. That never happened during my eating disorder. It has taken some getting used to, but the good feelings and the love feelings tend to make the hard feelings worthwhile.
8. You might not be the person you think you are.
I thought I knew who I was when I had my eating disorder, but really, it was the eating disorder that defined me. I said no to just about everything. I was hard and thin. I didn’t do things that hadn’t been planned. I didn’t like anything involving spontaneity, the outdoors, or the word “potluck”. There were a lot of rules.
As the world began to expand in recovery, so did I, as a person. I began to let things in, like nature, and accepting impromptu coffee invitations, and going to events and actually eating things. I surprised myself by liking things I never thought I would or could again. It can be scary and weird to discover the new (real) you, but in a way, it’s also exhilarating.
9. Recovery is S-L-O-W
When movie stars or celebrities go through recovery, they go into a 2-month program and come out triumphantly declaring themselves as recovered on magazine covers. Me, I have been in recovery for about 3 years and I consider myself advanced mentally, but still very much on the journey. I think that part of it is that my definition of recovery keeps on changing. At a certain point, I would have labeled recovery as “eating with others” or “not counting calories”, but as I reach those milestones, I keep on realizing that I have further to go, and that I want to go further, because I like the life that is opening up in spite of all of the crazy that comes along with it.
Recovery is very slow, and not always steady, especially in the face of crisis. Just knowing that it is a slow slog can be helpful.
10. It’s worth it.
Gosh, in reading this list, you might be thinking “is recovery even worth it?”. The answer is yes.
I mean, it’s hard, it’s awkward, it’s emotional, it can manifest physically. You’ll battle more than you ever thought. You’ll be crazy and weird and cry a lot, probably.
But you will also be alive and in the world. You’ll be living, not just existing. As an annoying inspirational poster once said, “If you are going through hell, keep going.” Life is waiting.
-Victoria x